CECILY.info

Herald Sun05 Jul 2008

I’m not a tennis fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I am certainly a fan of these two strong, beautiful, powerful women.

After reading Kera Bolonik’s Salon article about new wave music and how it gave her the courage to embrace her lesbian sexuality, I couldn’t help but think about the music I listened to when I was a sexually ambiguous, confused teenager who was filled with longing, uncertainty, and a face full of acne. In response, I offer my “I’m Coming Out” mixtape.

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After watching this promotional video for the Nokia N82, I understand why Ms. Jen makes a distinction between creators and consumers. I also understand why, in its current incarnation, an iPhone just isn’t for me.

One of the many by-products of increased FriendFeed use is that I’ve started looking for new ways to drive the conversations I’ve had there to this space. As a result, I’ve integrated Intense Debate comments on all posts from this post forward.

I don’t know how this will affect the commenters who are currently subscribed to my blog; after all, it’s one more service for you to sign up for (unless you use OpenID), which means your online identity gets dispersed across yet another service. There’s also the not insignificant matter of content/comment ownership when comments live in a hosted system. Should I decide to disable Intense Debate at some point in the future, I can export my comments, but does that mean the comments belong to me (and to the original commenter)? Do they now own the content because it lives on their servers?

Because you’re a part of this small community, I’d like to hear from you what you think about Intense Debate and related services. Have I introduced a barrier to your participation in this blog? Do you care where your comments end up, and if so, why?

This post could be subtitled “Or: where the hell have you people been in the last 9 years?”

I’ve been blogging a long time and across several different domains, although always under my real name. I’ve built solid relationships with people through blogging and by virtue of being connected to a super-connected person. I have a blogfam, and it’s a beautiful thing.

What I’ve never really had, however, is an audience.

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Meet MARV.

MARV - short for Mobile Assault Reading Vehicle - is our library’s latest attempt to bring new kinds of content to the library’s website.  MARV is made up of a first generation Flip Video camera, a Gorillapod tripod, two bike lights (one at the front, and one at the rear) a book, some rubber bands, inspiration, and a whole lot of mischief.

Kay, the Virtual Services librarian, had the bright idea that it would be great if we could film the inner workings of Translogic, the library’s conveyor system that transports books and other materials between departments. I’m known as somewhat of a gadget geek in the department, so when Kay told me about the project, I of course volunteered my camera and the tripod. Together with a couple of colleagues, we came up with MARV’s initial design, and set about trying to film what happens when a book is dropped in the internal and external book drops.

Sadly, there were some problems with the prototype; MARV tipped over when we put him down the internal bookdrop, and was too tall to fit in the external slot.  We re-engineered the design and made a second attempt at the outside slot, only to find that we hadn’t secured the camera properly, and the force of the impact caused MARV’s camera to flip forward onto the book cover, resulting in about 2+ minutes of dark footage.

Yet worry not: MARV will rise again.

• OpenBook WordPress Plugin
  Picks up book information from Open Library and makes it available for WordPress blogs.
  (tags: wordpress plugin library)

Tiffany tagged me:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

In no particular order:

1. Cut Copy - Lights & Music: reminds me of nights spent at the Amory in Atlanta. I can almost see shirtless speaker twinkies when I close my eyes.
2. The Go-Gos - Turn to You:  not just because Rob Lowe is in the video. A quintessential summer classic, but then again, all of their songs are.
3. Hot Chip - We’re Looking For a Lot of Love: an odd, down-tempo track from a band that is usually a lot dancier than this. The whole album is pretty good, but this one stands out because of the mood.
4. Santogold - You’ll Find a Way: I’m a sucker for 80s music. She sounds like The Police, Martha and the Muffins, Big Country, Missing Persons, and The Cure all rolled into one.
5. Girl Talk - Set it Off: for no other reason than he made The Guess Who and Mary J. Blige sound good together. Additional bonus points for the “Come On Eileen” sample. (You know you like that song. Don’t front.)
6. Teriyaki Boyz - ZOCK ON: Japanese rappers + Busta Rhymes (who is so futuristic and weird, he might as well be from Japan) + Pharell’s sexy stoner vibe. Dude. HOT.
7. N.E.R.D. - Everyone Nose (All The Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom): from the moment I heard it, it’s been in heavy rotation. The refrain is irresistible; so much so that I can (almost) overlook that the song is about doing cocaine in a nightclub bathroom.

All available here.

(I’m not tagging anyone because most of my people have been tagged already, but if you’re reading this and want to play along, go right ahead!)

(Editor’s Note: the problems with the migration annoyed me, and I’m impatient, so I’ve returned to hosting WordPress myself. I’ll leave my issues with the migration on this site in case they help someone else make the decision whether to migrate to the hosted version of WordPress.)

By now, I should be aware that my hunches and intuitions rarely turn out well.

Earlier today I got the bright idea to move my blog to WordPress.com. Since I run your basic, run of the mill blog, I thought it might be a good idea to save time and money by letting WordPress take care of the hassles of upgrading, server maintenance, and bug squashing. It isn’t as though I don’t have the technical chops to do these things myself, but I find that these things sometimes get in the way of creating content, and I’m all for anything that might make creating content a more pleasant experience.

I’d read Marshall Krotscheck’s thoughts on WordPress.com and how it compared to TypePad. There’s a lot of back and forth, and a lot of chest bumping going on in that piece and in the comments, but I walked away from the piece with the idea that moving my self-hosted blog to WordPress.com would be a Sunday walk in the park.

It wasn’t.

My domain resolved within the hour, and all seemed well. I’ve temporarily lost mail for this domain because it takes Google five days to release a Google Apps for Domain account, but I don’t get much email at this domain anyway, so that’s the least of my worries.

The greatest annoyance was that even though I suspected I had everything set up correctly, the domain mapping would not point to the correct address. It worked for about 10 minutes this afternoon, but stopped with absolutely no warning. I would try to pull up cecily.info, and I’d be greeted with the empty root directory of my former domain.

Hardly an optimal solution.

I tried again a few hours later, and still no domain mapping. Then, like a bright flash of sunshine on a dreary, overcast day, the mapping started working again around 10:00 pm. I started adding widgets to the sidebar and promptly lost the domain mapping yet again.

Two hours have passed since I experienced the last mapping snafu, and I’m not totally convinced that I won’t see it again over the course of the next 72 hours. I’ve also noticed a few limitations between WordPress.com and a self-hosted WordPress blog, namely that WordPress.com doesn’t allow custom JavaScript (except for Google and YouTube). I’ve lost Apture functionality, something I’ve come to really depend on for enriching blog posts, and I’ve also lost the ability to post tweets to my sidebar. Anil Dash was right to point this out in his response to Krotscheck. Not only that, WordPress.com has such a limited number of widgets available that the limitations of having WordPress.com host your blog far outweigh the benefits of this arrangement.

I still think that there’s value in hosted blog solutions, and it’s a feature that continues to grow in popularity as more bloggers decide that they don’t have the skills to monkey around in code, or that they just don’t have the time to tinker the way they used to. I’m going to keep this blog here for the next little while (especially since I’ve dropped $25 on mapping and the ability to edit CSS), but I’m seriously thinking of signing up for a TypePad account and kicking their tires for a bit.

Update: I thought it might be useful for future reference (and in case anyone at WordPress is watching) to keep a list of bugs/weird behaviour I’ve encountered since making the switch:

• If I go to cecily.info while logged in to wordpress.com and click the “Edit This” link on any post, I get a 500 internal server error.